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roon

@tszzl

Apr 29

i don’t understand “enough people must survive that it’s ok”. no i think if industrial civilization ends as we know it there’s no coming back. the whole astronomical waste thesis comes to an incorrect conclusion

the easy oil in the earths is tapped; the cost of new oil is only made feasible by a capital buildup of advanced technology. if you were an early industrializing civilization starting to mine oil, coal, gas today the initial ROI would be infeasibly low

it is very possible that this entire experiment ends in the next century if we don’t play our cards right. existential risk is everywhere and everpresent. intelligent life in this galaxy (or even on this planet) is clearly not abundant across the stretch of time

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roon

@tszzl

Apr 2

i increasingly think the shoggoth is an inaccurate & unpleasant metaphor. the base language model is more similar to our own visual field brain regions that are optimized in a pure predictive loop to minimize surprise than some alien god with hidden intentions

im absolutely sure that our visual field processors have several hidden suboptimizers that help it self improve over time but it seems strange to worry about my ocular cortex developing agency & stealing resources from the rest of my brain (even in a grander evolutionary sense)

you could argue that text is different, it encodes the causal structure of the world, which leads to instrumental convergence etc, but of course the dorsal stream, actively predicting motion requires quite a strong understanding of causality!

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roon

@tszzl

Mar 6

AIs can be creative and can make art. this was clear from the moment they beat us at Go. creativity is metaphysical but it’s also randomness mixed with success. you wouldn’t call a useless move on the Go board creative. but you can find printouts of alpha go’s famous move 37

zooming out a bit it’s also clear that dead simple processes like evolution can be creative. the human body is a work of art. the hummingbirds’ wings are a work of art. most human art is derivative of nature’s beauty which is produced by the most simple agency imaginable

ok but nature and go both have simple objectives. what if art requires a complicated objective like self expression? fitting the distribution of all human data and then fine tuning on pleasing the human eye/ ear is very much not a simple function

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roon

@tszzl

Mar 5

https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/1632135984270790657

this argument amounts to techno pessimism imo— if innovating in a high regulatory burden environment is a constraint satisfaction problem highly intelligent AIs should be able to navigate them better

https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/1632135984270790657

a simple example: 90% of the onerous regulation surrounding nuclear power is under the guise of radiation safety for power plant workers. what about when highly autonomous humanoids can patrol the plant? even regulators have a goodwill budget to play with

also the argument that healthcare and credentials are expensive due to regulation seems wrong — the demand of rich societies for healthcare and credentials is virtually infinite so ofc the prices increase over time. even in postscarcity you would expect these prices to rise!

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roon

@tszzl

Jan 20

it’s weird to me when people point to “onerous regulation” as a reason for why some tech isn’t progressing when the reality is that it’s the democratic system working as intended

for example, the reason that nobody ever makes headway with nuclear power is not directly because of some overzealous bureaucrats but because the public (God bless them) hates the shit out of nuclear

its aesthetics have not been good since the atomic age and it’s not really because of some widespread propaganda campaign (ppl vastly overestimate the skill of propagandists)

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roon

@tszzl

Dec 25, 2022

it seems profoundly interesting that people recognize a correct solution or a good thought when it comes to them. they are rewarded for good, low perplexity, elegant lines of reasoning by a sense of accomplishment or delight.

eg Einstein has solved special relativity for two years, makes little further progress, then has “the happiest thought of [his] life” that gravity = accelerating frame

it’s kind of obvious but it is much easier to discriminate good solutions than it is to generate them. in that way we’re able to spend unlimited compute on difficult problems and still make progress, on an individual level, an on a civilization level

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